Young Appalachian Musicians program going strong after 10 years

The Sweet Potato Pie Kids, consisting of some of the best players in the Young Appalachian Musicians program, perform at the 2018 Winter Bluegrass Jubilee on Saturday at Pickens High School.(Photo: Ron Barnett)

Ten years ago this month, an elementary school teacher in the hills above Pickens started a class for students who were interested in learning about the traditional music of their mountain ancestors.

Today, the Young Appalachian Musicians (YAM) program has spread to 12 schools with some 300 students participating across Pickens County, including my grandson, Elijah McMahan.

I think it’s a wonderful and amazing thing to have that many kids pickin’ guitars and banjos and mandolins and sawing on fiddles to time-honored tunes like “Old Joe Clark” and “Wildwood Flower.”

Kids tend to think their elders are not very cool, so I was never able to inspire mine to pick up the guitar habit. But somehow, Betty McDaniel, the aforementioned teacher who started YAM at Holly Springs Elementary School in 2008, has been able to make playing this music the cool thing to do if you’re a young person in Pickens County.

She had help, of course, from a bunch of volunteers, musicians and teachers, but it’s been a pretty phenomenal 10 years.

One of the program's alumni, Danielle Yother, made it to America’s Got Talent. Ella Hennessee, 11 years old at the time, was named Best Singer in South Carolina a couple of years ago. One YAM graduate, a banjo player, is now a student at West Point.

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The Sweet Potato Pie Kids perform "Wildwood Flower" at the 2018 Winter Bluegrass Jubilee at Pickens High School on Saturday.
Ron Barnett

“The ones who stay with it, not only do they seem to do well in music, they do well in school,” according to Betty.

When I talked to her on her cell phone this week, Betty was in California with a YAM student for a talent competition. I am sworn to secrecy as to what contest that is, but I guarantee you have heard of it.

I got inspired to write this column after going to hear my grandson and his group of about 40 brand new guitar pickers play at the 2018 Winter Bluegrass Jubilee at Pickens High School on Saturday.

They played “Little Liza Jane.”

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First year students of the Young Appalachian Musicians program perform "Little Liza Jane" at the 2018 Winter Bluegrass Jubilee at Pickens High School on Saturday

The stars of the show were the Sweet Potato Pie Kids. (What else would you name a band of YAMs?)

They’re selected from the best of the YAM students, and they go around playing gigs, raising money for POSAM – pronounced “possum.” That’s Preserving Our Southern Appalachian Music Inc., a nonprofit organization that was set up to support YAM.

The Winter Bluegrass Jubilee was a fundraiser for POSAM, and judging from the number of people who were there when I was, it was a huge success. It was a daylong event, with a lineup of professional bluegrass bands, including Left Lane, which is comprised of YAM graduates. Afterward, they got together in "jam rooms" to play with anybody who wanted to join in.

Most of the money raised goes to cut the program's costs to students. They pay for lessons on a sliding scale, based on their subsidized school lunch eligibility, with nobody paying more than $12 a lesson.

I think part of what makes this program a success is that the older students help teach the younger ones. Children might not want to be like their parents, but they tend to think high school kids are pretty cool, so learning from them gives them something to aspire to.

The other big key to this program’s success, I think, is that they teach kids to play by ear.

A lot of parents might think,'Oh no, I want my child to learn to read music.' Well, that’s fine, but music is not dots on a piece of paper. It’s sounds. And being able to hear how sounds fit together to make melodies and chords, and developing a feel for rhythm – that’s what playing music is all about. Written music is just a way of putting it down on paper so somebody who can’t pick it out by ear can figure it out.

Here’s the way Betty explains it: “I feel like everybody needs to learn to read music too. But I think they need to learn to play it by ear first, because I think that’s the more natural way. And I think that’s why a lot of these kids have picked up things very quickly.”

“We don’t learn to read first,” she pointed out. “We learn to listen, we learn to talk, imitate what we’ve heard and then we learn to read. So why aren’t we learning music the same way?”

Preach it, Betty.

And they do a lot of getting together with other musicians and playing at places like the Oolenoy Community Center, where the Pumpkin Festival is held each fall.

“I feel like getting together and jamming and being part of a music community, I think that’s what’s carried a lot of these kids on through,” Betty said.

This whole culture that’s being cultivated in Pickens County of learning about the ways of our ancestors goes way beyond music. Betty started out teaching clogging, until her knees couldn’t take it anymore.

After Holly Springs Elementary was closed a couple of years ago, Betty and some of the folks up there turned the schoolhouse into a mountain arts center, and not just for children. They have adult classes in subjects like blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking, Appalachian cooking and herbal medicine.

At the jubilee Saturday, they had an arts and crafts fair and workshops in various traditional arts.

And sometime this summer, there’s going to be another big festival to celebrate the 10th anniversary of YAM. Details on that are still being worked out.

In the meantime, there’s this competition out in California. I expect we’ll be hearing more about that soon.